September 26, 2011

Ready to fight back?

Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.

You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.

Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue.

Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!

Support Progressive Journalism

The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.

Fight Back!

Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week.

You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.

Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue.

Travel With The Nation

Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits.

Sign up for our Wine Club today.

Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?

It’s not only the image of the nameless black woman on the cover of The Economist as the face of "shame" in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, or the devoted and capable Mammy in The Help, a book-turned-movie that misrepresents black history in fundamental ways. There are many more problematic images of black women that saturate media today that skew our perception of reality. Melissa Harris-Perry’s book,Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, tells us that it is important, not only for black women but all of us, to rethink the ways to critique and resist the "crooked" force of racism and sexism in our cultural and political life, and to understand the political ramifications of the personal struggle of American black women.

On September 19, Melissa Harris-Perry sat down with Daniella Bibbs Leger of the New American Communities Initiative and Center for American Progress, and talks about her political and emotional responses to the negative images of black women in the culture. Harris-Perry reminds us once again that "the personal is political," and walking through topics of shame, entitlement, reproductive rights, and the image of the First Lady, the author shows us that resistance is possible in many ways.